Reframing incentives for climate policy action | Nature Energy https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-021-00934-2 PDF: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-021-00934-2.pdf
The costs of generating solar and wind energy, which depend on location, have already or will soon reach parity with the lowest-cost traditional fossil alternatives and investment in low-carbon technologies is generating substantial new employment.
The notion that a country should benefit from free-riding on other countries’ climate policies can also be challenged. Incremental decarbonization, increasing energy efficiency and the economic impacts of COVID-19 have led oil and gas demand and prices to decline substantially. Changes in oil and gas prices, combined with slumps in production, may therefore have disruptive structural effects on high-cost fossil fuel producers, such as the United States, Canada, Russia and South America. Meanwhile, shedding expensive imports benefits gross domestic product (GDP) and employment in large importer regions, such as the European Union, China and India, as money not spent on expensive energy imports is spent domestically, and output is boosted by major low-carbon investment programmes.
Half world’s fossil fuel assets could become worthless by 2036 in net zero transition Jonathan Watts, Ashley Kirk, Niamh McIntyre, Pablo Gutiérrez and Niko Kommenda https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2021/nov/04/fossil-fuel-assets-worthless-2036-net-zero-transition Thu 4 Nov 2021
Countries that are slow to decarbonise will suffer but early movers will profit; the study finds that renewables and freed-up investment will more than make up for the losses to the global economy.
It highlights the risk of producing far more oil and gas than required for future demand, which is estimated to leave $11tn-$14tn (£8.1tn-£10.3tn) in so-called stranded assets – infrastructure, property and investments where the value has fallen so steeply they must be written off.
Shankar Sharma (by email) comments: In India's case more than half of coal power assets can be expected to face
the likelihood of becoming worthless for various reasons... Will it stir their leaders from blindly supporting fossil fule based economic paradigm? .. Our leaders continue to commit our limited resources into these ill-conceived projects..
IF we are serious of pursuing net-zero, why is our climate policy should straight away disincentivise coal for instance and not expand its mining, destroying forests, and forest dwelling communities.
Further the progress on the incentivisatiion of decentralised renewable energy like solar roof tops and net-metering is slow or tortuous , which again will incentivise hand over of large land and other resources to large centralised farms, and transmission systems in order to fulfill our international committments. .
NET-NET: More than making International committments, we need incentivise and empower poor people to move directly into a post carbon economy & energy development which they are in control of.
